Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Four new echoes in 'Francis revolution'

By now, the broad outlines of the Francis revolution seem reasonably
clear -- a church more focused on mercy than on judgment, a political
stance closer to the center, and a pastoral emphasis on the peripheries
and the poor.

Over the second weekend in January, four new echoes in that
revolution sounded in Rome.

Taken together, these developments suggest
not only that Francis is pressing ahead, but that his example is
emboldening others.

New cardinals

Francis announced 19 new cardinals Sunday, including 16 under 80 and
therefore eligible to vote for the next pope.

The immediate takeaway was
the broad global distribution in this crop, with just four new Vatican
cardinals and only two others from Europe among the electors.

The other new voting-age cardinals include four Latin Americans, two Asians, two Africans and one from the Caribbean.

Upon closer examination, there's also a clear option for the periphery among Francis' picks.

For instance, Bishop Chibly Langlois will become the first cardinal
from Haiti, by most measures one of the poorest countries in the world.

The appointment breaks an unwritten Vatican rule that if the Caribbean
was to have a cardinal, the red hat should go to one of the region's
three Catholic powerhouses -- Cuba, Puerto Rico or the Dominican
Republic.

Moreover, Langlois' diocese of Les Cayes is not one of the two
archdioceses in Haiti, so Langlois represents an option for the
periphery even within his own nation.

In addition, one of the three "honorary" cardinals named by Francis,
meaning men already over 80, was another Caribbean bishop, retired
Archbishop Kevin Edward Felix of Castries.

The same point applies to the new cardinal from the Philippines,
Archbishop Orlando B. Quevedo, whose Cotabato archdiocese traditionally
has not been considered a major see on a par with Manila or Cebu. In
Italy, Francis bypassed the traditional red hat sees of Venice and Turin
in order to lift up Archbishop Gualtiero Bassetti of Perugia.

(That choice was taken not only as an option for traditionally
neglected locales but also for political moderates, given that the
current archbishops of both Venice and Turin are generally seen as
members of the conservative wing of the Italian church.)

The Feb. 22 event in which Francis creates these new cardinals thus shapes up as the "Consistory of the Periphery."

Baptisms

On the same day he announced the new princes of the church, Francis also baptized 32 children in the Sistine Chapel.

The pope made headlines by telling the mothers present they shouldn't
be embarrassed if they needed to breastfeed their infants, but the more
substantive newsflash was that among those baptized by Francis was a
little girl, Giulia, whose parents were married only civilly and thus
not in the church.

According to La Stampa, this was the first time a child from
an "irregular" marriage was baptized in a public papal Mass.

The
parents, Ivan Scardia and Nicoletta Franco, told reporters they had been
at a General Audience on Sept. 25 and asked the pope if he would
baptize their second child, and he accepted.

To be sure, there's no bar against baptizing such children. Canon 868
states only that for a baptism to be licitly performed, there has to be
a founded hope that the child will be brought up in the Catholic
religion.

More generally, church law states that the faithful have a right to
the sacraments and there has to be a good reason to withhold them.

That said, it's easy to imagine that under other circumstances, there
would have been resistance to the idea of the pope himself performing
such a baptism in a public setting based on concern that it might blur
church teaching on marriage.

The choice by Francis to forge ahead was utterly consistent with his
practice as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Then-Cardinal Jorge
Mario Bergoglio criticized priests who declined to baptize the children
of unwed mothers in 2012.

"These are the hypocrites of today," Bergoglio said, "the ones who
clericalize the church, who keep the people of God from salvation.

In effect, the pope's baptism Sunday profiles as another gesture intended to underline the priority of mercy.

An archbishop behind bars?

Late last week, new agencies around the world carried a story to the
effect that the Vatican had refused a Polish request to extradite
Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, the former papal ambassador to the
Dominican Republic removed in August in the wake of sex abuse
allegations both there and in Poland.

That report brought a denial from the Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Fr.
Federico Lombardi, who said on Saturday that there has been no
extradition request and that the Vatican is ready to collaborate with
inquests both in Poland and in the Dominican Republic.

Lombardi added that the 65-year-old Wesolowski is facing a canonical
investigation by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which
could lead to his laicization as a priest and bishop.

The revolutionary element was what else Lombardi said: Wesolowski is
also facing a criminal investigation by the Vatican's own criminal
court.

Back in July, Francis issued a ruling that extended the jurisdiction
of the Vatican's criminal court in sex abuses cases to papal diplomats,
and Wesolowski thus shapes up as the first real test of that ruling.

In theory, Wesolowski could follow the path blazed by Paolo Gabriele,
the erstwhile papal butler who was charged with being the mole at the
heart of the Vatican leaks affair under Benedict XVI.

Gabriele was
subjected to a Vatican criminal trial, convicted, and sentenced to jail.

The main difference is that while Benedict pardoned Gabriele, it's
unlikely Francis would do the same for Wesolowski should he be
convicted.

While it's too early to say how this process may play out, should it
end in Francis putting an archbishop behind bars, it would be seen by
most observers as a clear signal that this pope means business on the
sex abuse front.

A funeral for a homeless man

In late December, a 63-year-old homeless man named Alessandro died
during a particularly cold night in Rome, on a street near the Vatican.

In itself there was nothing unusual about it in that the streets around
the Vatican attract a high population of homeless, and every year, a few
pass away during the winter cold.

What followed, however, amounts to another index of the "Francis effect."

Students at the Urban College, a residence for seminarians from the
developing world located on the Janiculum Hill across from the Vatican
(and next door to the North American College, where seminarians from the
United States reside), heard of Alessandro's death and decided they
wanted to do something.

They asked authorities at the university for permission to celebrate a
funeral, and the idea landed on the desk of Cardinal Fernando Filoni,
prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the
Vatican's missionary department, which oversees the Urban College.

Filoni signed on, and the Vatican official responsible for the pope's
personal charitable projects, Polish Archbishop Konrad Krajewski, agreed
to celebrate the funeral Mass.

On Friday, Filoni, Krajewski, 200 students, and a score of
Alessandro's homeless friends in and around the Vatican filed into the
chapel at the Urban College to mourn his loss.

Krajewski downplayed his presence: "I'm a bishop of the streets," he said. "It's normal that I would do this."

Still, the press by the students at the Urban College to organize a
last gesture of tenderness for a man basically forgotten during life is
one indication that the "Francis effect" is reaching down into the next
generation of priests and future church leaders.